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What, then, is the spirit [guiding the present life and
determining the future]?
The Spirit of here and now.
And the God?
The God of here and now.
Spirit, God; This in act within us, conducts every life; for,
even here and now, it is the dominant of our Nature.
That is to say that the dominant is the spirit which takes
possession of the human being at birth?
No: the dominant is the Prior of the individual spirit; it
presides inoperative while its secondary acts: so that if the
acting force is that of men of the sense-life, the tutelary
spirit is the Rational Being, while if we live by that Rational
Being, our tutelary Spirit is the still higher Being, not
directly operative but assenting to the working principle. The
words "You shall yourselves choose" are true, then; for by our
life we elect our own loftier.
But how does this spirit come to be the determinant of our fate?
It is not when the life is ended that it conducts us here or
there; it operates during the lifetime; when we cease to live,
our death hands over to another principle this energy of our own
personal career.
That principle [of the new birth] strives to gain control, and if
it succeeds it also lives and itself, in turn, possesses a
guiding spirit [its next higher]: if on the contrary it is
weighed down by the developed evil in the character, the spirit
of the previous life pays the penalty: the evil-liver loses grade
because during his life the active principle of his being took
the tilt towards the brute by force of affinity. If, on the
contrary, the Man is able to follow the leading of his higher
Spirit, he rises: he lives that Spirit; that noblest part of
himself to which he is being led becomes sovereign in his life;
this made his own, he works for the next above until he has
attained the height.
For the Soul is many things, is all, is the Above and the Beneath
to the totality of life: and each of us is an Intellectual
Kosmos, linked to this world by what is lowest in us, but, by
what is the highest, to the Divine Intellect: by all that is
intellective we are permanently in that higher realm, but at the
fringe of the Intellectual we are fettered to the lower; it is as
if we gave forth from it some emanation towards that lower, or,
rather some Act, which however leaves our diviner part not in
itself diminished.
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